The Wreck Out on the Highway: Novels and Auto Accidents

It only takes a second. One moment, everything’s fine; the next, everything’s shattered. A friend of mine said her father once told her, handing over the keys to the family car, “When you get behind that wheel, you’ve put your finger on the trigger of a loaded gun.” For decades, “Road injury” has, according to the World Health Organization, been one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. As irrational as America’s obsession with gun ownership is, the fact remains that most of us don’t own one and gun violence affects far fewer of our lives than death and injury from automobile accidents.

It’s the dramatic potential — and here the meaning of potential in mechanics is also relevant — in an automobile accident that has tended more than a few novelists to use it as a catalyst or centerpiece. It’s probably no coincidental that most of these novels appeared between the late 1940s and mid-1960s: these were the years when American cars were big, fast, and almost completely lacking in any safety measures aside from the driver’s attention and skill. Freeways hadn’t yet overtaken two-lane blacktop highways as the primary conduit for travel of any distance, and any kid with memories from those days will be able to recall wincing as soon as their dad started to move out to pass some truck or car driving too slow for his taste.

One of the first of these novels was Fritz Peter’s The Descent (1952). Peters spent his teenage years living in the loose community of followers around the mystic George Gurdjieff, arriving not long after Gurdjieff suffered a near-fatal car accident outside Paris and often wheeling him around the grounds in those first months — one of the memories recounted in his Boyhood with Gurdjieff (1964). It’s not surprising, then, that his experiences with Gurdjieff and the philosopher’s interest in man’s ability to control his destiny led him to use a multi-car accident on a mountain highway in New Mexico as an instrument for illustrating how its outcome might or might not be affected by the actions or thoughts of its victims. Peters captured the disruptive effects of an accident:

Reality, the fundamental, basic reality of life, had been imposed upon everyone involved in the accident for at least a short time. The dreams, illusions and enchantments, the superficial aims and purposed, desires and wishes, of the victims and the spectators were stripped away by the shock, leaving only the human essentials. The veneer of civilization that passes for human dignity had — for a time — ceased to exist.

Peters takes a Ship of Fools/Grand Hotel approach, leading up to the event through the eyes of a dozen or more of the people involved — victims as well as those who have to clean up the mess. For some, the accident quickly becomes a faint memory or statistic, but for those responsible and injured — physically or emotionally — their lives “continue to reverberate to the consequences.”

Joseph Lambert, the rich businessman who kills a busload of school children when he’s focusing on the hand up his mistress’s skirt than the one of the wheel of his Citroen in Georges Simenon’s The Accomplices (1955), has his own sense of predestination in the first moments after the impact:

It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor resentful, as if he had always been expecting it. He realized in a flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault.

As Simenon was often wont to do, he takes morbid pleasure in compounding the sins involved in his hero’s downfall. Not just a hit-and-run accident, but adultery, corruption, cover-up, collusion, and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. The sinister possibilities of the situation, in the hands of a master of human fallibility, make The Accomplices one of Simenon’s all-time best romans dur.

In Juice (1958), on the other hand, Stephen Becker’s focus is less on the psyche and more on the system. When Joe Harrison, heading home after three martinis and feeling no pain, runs down and kills a pedestrian on his way home, the system of business and justice in Southern California kicks in. The head of a chain of newspapers and television stations, Joe is in too prominent a position for those with a stake in his reputation to sit idle. The chairman of his board steps in, hires an expensive Hollywood lawyer, and mounts a campaign of public and private persuasion — the “juice” of the title — to swing a verdict of innocence. Becker caves in to his sense of justice in the end, which prevents Juice from being quite as juicy as it could have been.

Fan Nichols is an unjustly neglected woman “hard case” novelist who had a unique take on a hit-and-run story in Be Silent Love (1960) (also known by its unsubtle pulp paperback title The Girl in the Death Seat). Here, the focus is on the passenger, not the driver or the victim. Riding alongside her married boyfriend on the way to their weekend hideaway along the Hudson, Kay Hubbard begins to realize that adultery isn’t the worst thing he’s capable of after he clips a teenager and decides to drive away, hoping that no one has seen the accident. For a while, she plays along — it was her car, after all — but gradually understands the inevitable domino effect of compounded lies.

Ironically, though, Nichol’s most convincing character is the boyfriend, David Drake, a mass market paperback version of Richard Yates’ Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road. On the one hand, he’s full of his own superiority, smugly satisfied that he has managed both to wed a Congressman’s daughter and to bed a gorgeous redheaded girlfriend. On the other, no matter how high up the ladder he might rise, he can never stop looking down in fear:

Everybody was jealous of his success and he had to fight for what he wanted; he had always had to fight everybody, the ones trying to pull him down, step on him, knife him, crush him, all the bottom dogs of the world after him, snapping at his heels to stop him from climbing a ladder they could never, never climb.

Unfortunately, to resolve the predicament she’s created, Nichols has to turn Drake into a psychokilling machine and plausibility flies out the door by the third or fourth murder-to-cover-up-the previous-murder. Well, at least the pages fly by.

In Elizabeth Janeway’s The Accident (1964), the young spoiled son of a wealthy importer runs into a tree at 97 miles per hour. He walks away with a few scratches; his college friend in the passenger seat is disabled for life. The accident sparks a previously faint sense of conscience in the young man. His family, on the other hand, responds in a variety of unhelpful ways: denial (his mother); corruption (his father); abandonment (his father again). Janeway introduces the wreck into their lives like a tiny drop of acid on a set of poorly-finished welds, and soon the connections are all coming apart: the center cannot hold when there’s nothing there in the first place. The New York Times gave the book to Frederick C. Crews, hot off his moralistic bestseller, The Pooh Perplex, and his verdict was predictably castigating. He called The Accident a “very adult soap opera” and found it typical of the genre of soft-hearted liberal literature whose “distinctive aspect … is its morbid sympathy for human weakness; any weakness will do.” Janeway, whose Powers of the Weak cries out to be rediscovered as a guide to help us rebalance the allocation of power and navigate out of the mess America’s in, was anything but soft-hearted, but Crews wasn’t the first or last man with an agenda to employ something a woman had written as a soapbox to hector from.

Though published just four years after The Accident, Thomas Rogers’ The Pursuit of Happiness (1968) in some ways seems the more dated book. There are more than a few parallels between the two novels. In both, the driver at fault is a college student and son of a wealthy family. Janeway’s Steven Benedict destroys the life of his friend; Rogers’ William Popper kills a black woman on the streets of Chicago while’s chatting away with his girlfriend. Both men take responsibility, if not immediately — Popper going to jail for manslaughter, though he eventually decides to escape to Mexico. Both families respond in a variety of ways — protective, abetive, supportive.

But The Pursuit of Happiness is very much a novel of its particular time: 1968. William Popper’s classmates would be marching against Mayor Richard Daley’s police a few months later and the living rooms of his parents and aunts and uncles would be filled with images of dead soldiers in Vietnam and race riots in Watts and Detroit. Rogers took his epigraph from the Nichomachean Ethics: “There is a general assumption that the manner of a man’s life is a clue to what he on reflection regards as the good — in other words, happiness.”

This book came out around the time that you could buy a poster with Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character Linus and the slogan, “Happiness is a Warm Blanket.” And that, in the end, appears to have been William Popper’s own definition. The book is unquestionably well-written, well-constructed. It’s a classic of a certain spare, dispassionate style of fiction. Marian Engel found it “a novel remarkably free of cant,” wrote that the book “gains its stature from its honesty, its truth to patterns of speech and feeling, its accurate and free rendering of the conundrums of human relationships”: “There is no clumsy exposition; there are no purple passages; nothing is particularly quotable.”

And this, I’d argue, is what ultimately undermines the book. William Popper is the epitome of the well-bred, well-educated, well-fed white American who wishes everyone well as long as there isn’t too much discomfort involved for himself. His answer to the American dream is to escape America — which leads me to agree with The New Statesman’s reviewer, Vernon Scannell: “Well, that’s all very fine, I suppose, if you are living on unearned income with a smashing bird in sunny Mexico, but it doesn’t help those millions doing time in the big gaol of the USA.” If the USA is something of a car wreck itself right now, running away from the scene might be an easy answer, but it’s probably not the right one.